The advances made by malicious hackers and some current and future means of prevention are examined. The various strains of computer viruses are described. Among these are new types such as stealth and polymorphic viruses, which are difficult to detect. The growing use of Virus Exchange Bulletin Boards, which promote the technology of writing difficult viruses, is discussed. The particular vulnera...
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Concerns about the main encrypting and enciphering schemes being proposed as a way to ensure data security are examined. To elucidate the issues involved, public-key cryptography is explained. The collision between the interests of government intelligence agencies and private groups as evidenced by the controversy over the Digital Signature Standard (DSS) proposed by the US National Institute of S...
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A tutorial on viruses, worms, bacteria, and other computer diseases is presented. It describes how experts classify the various forms of malicious code at work today, the ways in which they hide and work their mischief, and a few of the infamous incidents-such as the attack on the Internet network, in the fall of 1988, of a worm program that devoured massive amounts of CPU time-that have gained in...
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The charges by opponents of MIL-HDBK-217, Reliability Prediction of Electronic Equipment, that it is inaccurate, leads to costly overdesign, actually prevents higher reliability levels from being achieved, and does not address the true causes of failures are examined. The stress-margin approach, using models based on physics-of-failure analyses, which is being considered as an alternative, is desc...
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The results to date of a cooperative effort begun by AT&T, IBM, and MIT, called the Consortium for Superconducting Electronics (CSE), are reviewed. The goal is to bring high-temperature superconductivity to market rapidly. Of primary importance in these early years is the CSE's materials and processing program, which develops and evaluates substrate materials and film-deposition techniques for spe...
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The component concepts of the term 'reliability' are examined to clarify why its measurement is difficult. Two approaches to measuring the reliability of finished code are described. The first, a developer-based view, focuses on software faults; if the developer has grounds for believing that the system is relatively fault-free, then the system is assumed to be reliable. The second, a user-based v...
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